The Teaching of Segovia: An Explosion of Freedomby Piero Bonaguri Translation by Stephen Figoni

To carry out the theme of my talk, I would basically like to re-propose some of Segovia's affirmations and comment on them in light of my experience. I'll start with a slightly provocative premise: I believe Segovia was understood more on the outside of our little guitar world than on the inside (both by the enthusiastic imitators of the maestro and his bitter opponents) and that still today it's paying a bit for this incomprehension.

Here's the first phrase, I believe said by Segovia to a student: "You don't need to try to be the second Segovia, but the first you."For me, meeting Segovia was liberating because he helped me to be me while playing. When I met him I was already working on this problem and I needed to be helped. Having lessons with Segovia I felt free to not copy anyone, even him, but helped to find myself. So, playing for him I felt very comfortable. Many things came about from this: this freedom with time consolidated itself and took me to make choices against the crowd, motivated by my artistic convictions and not by what was in style, without worrying too much about possible consequences.

But how did Segovia help this "liberation"? Here's the second phrase I'd like to cite: "What a teacher can, and has to do, is be a guide, abbreviate the journey of the disciple. But he can't provide for him that sacred fire that will have to fill his interpretations."Segovia said that the interpreter confronted with a piece is like Jesus who raises Lazarus from the dead; the interpreter also brings back to life.This is a beautiful comparison: what's revived is the piece, through the intervention of another. The encounter between the two sparks the flame that starts the fire. Between the interpreter and the piece, a mysterious relationship is therefore created, the terms of which are although clear. It's about letting the other live – so not overbearing oneself with violence to the music being played – but if I don't revive the piece, it remains dead in a certain sense. It seems to me that many problems concerning "freedom" opposed to "faithfulness" of the interpreter have here the possibility to at least be imposed correctly. Even technicism for its own sake, today widespread, is judged by this phrase: "Of an interpreter that doesn't love, one can say: he's perfect, but nothing more". There again is that sacred fire…

But, entering into the job of interpretation of a piece, what does all this mean? Segovia defined interpretation as "a synthesis in continual expansion". In this synthesis every particular illuminates and is illuminated by the overall meaning, by what the piece "says" to me. A bit contrary to the attitude so diffused today: we are taken to analyze every particular, leaving aside the problem of meaning – I remember the resistance of some students when in class I "dared" to pose the question on the meaning of what one plays. Also among musicians the word "analysis" is much more stylish today than the word "synthesis". But as it was acutely observed, I can analyze all the pieces of a car, but I can't say to know it if I don't know what it does. And this understanding of the meaning is the "synthesis". All of the above has to do with the question of freedom. If freedom is experienced in the satisfaction of one's own desires, the bigger the desire we have, the greater there's the possibility of being free. If I cut or if I censure my desire to know most profoundly the sense of what I play, I will never be very free in playing. Instead, Segovia challenges everyone saying that interpretation has to be "like life, an explosion of freedom".

The meaning of what one plays and also knowing how to collocate the piece of music within the tradition and culture from which it comes also plays a part in this comprehension. There are some phrases written here and there by Segovia that are very interesting concerning this matter. In the preface to the Sor studies, the maestro realistically observes that "the rich traditions of the antique vihuelists degraded gradually as far as not having, in the history of the guitar, but few names in the 19th century, and that even they didn't belong to vigorous talents." In an interview, he said that thanks to the transcriptions of the antique repertory for lute, an entire era can live again thanks to the guitar – maybe one doesn't agree on these concrete judgements, but these phrases can let us intuit the high motivation that animated Segovia's choices. Still, for the debut of Carlevaro, Segovia wrote: "La guitarra exige, de quien a ella se consagra, dones naturales muy heterogéneos: sensibilidad finísima, tan fina que se sienta perturbada por la sombra de un cabello; oido sutil para percibir y combinar la riquísima policromía sonora de tan bello instrumento, el cual, gracias al tenue halo de sus resonancias, opera a veces la ilusión, no de que se escucha sino de que se sueña con la música; manos flexibles y recias para modelar el cuerpo sonoro de las obras con ternura yenergía, impetu y precisión. Pero estos dones, para que sean fecundos, han de recibir el calor solarde la Cultura." This culture is, I believe, the richness of the cultural tradition in which we are born. Segovia was artifice of his rooting the modern guitar in a "high" cultural context, he put our world in contact with the great compositional and interpretative musical tradition of Europe. Segovia transmitted in his teaching, with words and his example, the reach of a tradition that lived in him: in this sense, he taught "what you do and what you don't do." This goes beyond the limit that the maestro, like anyone, had and which some denigrators pointed their finger at wrongly in my opinion: Being, that is, also a child of the times, linked then to ways of thinking and feeling typical of a certain era. This inevitable conditioning was overcome by Segovia through the nexus that he maintained with an artistic and cultural tradition of which he understood some valid constants in every period (from here his refusal of technicism and research of easy effects). It's a bit like chivalry: rules can change with time, but the disrespectful and gentlemen have always been…

And Segovia said to me the last time I saw him: "I want the guitar to go .. me". Nowadays I happen to work with several composers that certainly don't use the musical language familiar to Segovia: however, even in the music of today it's possible to recognize - if one's been educated to this – the presence or absence of good taste, of artistic geniality, of the capacity to reach the listener, of technique serving expression or sought as mere exhibition of talent.

For those who play an instrument, all this knowledge has to then translate into adequate instrumental gesture. Yet again, above all else let's identify the goal to reach: the maestro said, "you need to intervene in the piece, without stopping it." To get to this point, practicing is vital: a discipline for which every gesture is always under the control of the interpreter. The fingers have to do "exactly what I ask them to do." The brief indication that Segovia writes, almost in passing, in the preface to the diatonic scales (first play slowly and strongly, then quietly and fast) was the precious key for me to get into a way of playing that counts for any piece of music (try it to believe it!), to learn that capacity to "intervene in the piece without stopping it."

The esteem Segovia had for work, for hard daily study, was encouraging for me. He said, "If a seed isn't lovingly cultivated, it won't grow, it won't become a flower and then a fruit. Let us note: work as a loving care of a seed, not as obsessive, mechanic and alienating practice. In another point the maestro talked of the "holy discipline of study".

At this point the consideration of the instrument (guitar in our case) comes into play. And here we find an apparent paradox: on one side there was a kind of detachment in Segovia concerning the instrument that's nothing more than an "island, among many others, while the music is the ocean." You can see this detachment in the way he held the guitar (the writer Maria Zambrano says that Segovia played without hurrying and almost without touching the guitar, barely grazing it) and in his repeated advice to the students to not listen too much to other guitarists, but to other instrumentalists. The maestro also suggested to think more about the music than of the guitar: "to abandon, rather, the guitar, and never the music." A nice freedom compared to our certain maniacal obsessions for the "piece of wood"! However, to really put the beauty that can be experienced in music into action, the instrument becomes important; there is the extreme love for the guitar, for this "synthesis of the forest, " for this "orchestra seen through backwards binoculars" how he called it, for its unique expressive possibilities. I remember Segovia's collaboration with the luthiers, with the Augustine string-makers, but most importantly an aspect that I study with awe still today: the knowledge of his fingerings, from the fist publications to apparently unimportant details. The maestro was then extremely free to modify his fingerings, actually he always did it – one time he said because of the difference in sound of nylon strings compared to gut he had eliminated many left-hand slurs and harmonics present in the old editions. But in these changes Segovia followed and refined the same line of thought: privilege the artistic search without compromises (fingering in function of the phrasing, of the melody) combined with realism, also helped by the continued verification that came from his experience "in the field".

And lastly his rapport with the audience; when we play for someone, the tie we have with the piece is opened up to whoever is listening to us. The synthesis expands even more, and so the possibility to experience the explosion of freedom. In an interview Segovia said, "The artist is a man like the others and mustn't ever fall in love with himself. He would inevitably lose something… Like the others, with an extra marvelous gift: and because of this gift he always needs to be close to every other man." Even in this case, a usefulness was derived from an ideal criteria, leading to the composition of the programs, to the choice of the closing pieces of a recital, to the very way to relate with the audience, while still giving attention to the needs of his career and image.

I'll conclude with the phrase of another author, the great Charles Peguy, because it seems to me that he explains pretty well what learning means, having had the fortune to meet a maestro; I cite him because I hope no one will miss the occasion that I was talking about in the premise! It's not a phrase by Segovia, but I believe that the maestro would endorse it.

"When the student does nothing but repeat not the same resonance but a miserable reprint of the master's thought; when the student is nothing but a student, even one of the best students, he won't ever generate anything. A student doesn't begin to create until he himself introduces a new resonance (that is, the measure in which he's not a student). Not that he doesn't have to have a master, but one has to descend from another like a father-son relationship, not through the scholastic path of discipleship."